


Never Seen A Night So Long

by Sharksdontsleep



Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: Crying, Crying During Sex, Drug-Induced Sex, Gags, Medical Bondage, Medical Kink, Non-Consensual Bondage, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Other, Rocinante - Freeform, Sounding, Tentacles, Treat Fic, Urethral Play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-11-22 22:57:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11390154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharksdontsleep/pseuds/Sharksdontsleep
Summary: They leave him alone on the ship. Or, well, not alone, but without other people.





	Never Seen A Night So Long

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nonconamod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonconamod/gifts).



> Also known as "pounded in the butt by one sexy lady ship." If you're any way associated with the show, you probably don't want to read this.
> 
> In this, Alex sees the Roci as female, but the ship isn't specifically gendered. I don't know what's become of my life. 
> 
> Inspired by the tagset! This fandom needs more hot ship-on-Alex action. Title from Hank Williams' 'So Lonesome I Could Cry.' Thanks to J for answering my emails that contain 'um, Alex gets boned by a spaceship' and still fixing my commas.

They leave him alone on the ship. Or, well, not alone, but without other people. 

The ship itself - _herself_ and Alex really shouldn't think of her like that, but he does, feels like a companion, not quite a person, but a presence, breathing around him, humming her little morning hums when he wakes at 0700 standard, like his wife did while he made breakfast. In the times they were still speaking to one another, anyway.

He gets up, late enough to have lost that military precision, but earlier than most of the rest of the crew if they don't have to be. He dresses, though he's alone and likely the only human for thousands of clicks. Still, it'd probably say something about him if he sat in his pilot's chair buckass naked. It probably says something that he considered it.

He drinks coffee, and damn if Mars didn't get this right. Easy enough to cultivate shade-grown coffee on a planet with thin sun, even if it feels like a luxury. There were times with shortages, enough that good Martians drank chicory, coffee as illicit as heroin.

He's thankful that these aren't those times. Even with the Belt and Mars and Earth all seemingly on the brink of something, ('war' his mind whispers, and he ignores it) he feels flush, alone on a ship that could feed him for a hundred hundred years, long after the CO2 scrubbers give out and the shielding finally succumbs to the pummeling rays of the sun, the trauma of living outside a magnetosphere.

He has another cup of coffee.

The problem with waiting is that there's nothing to do that isn't inherently waiting. He drinks his coffee and waits. He reads through old flight plans and waits. He gets up to piss and waits. He mentally toggles through the events that led them here and waits. (Beginning not with the Cant but with Eros; enough Belters remember the Cant for him, and if he thinks too hard, he'll only see the blood where Garvey's head used to be.) He looks at Earther porn and jerks off and waits.

He has a few non-pornographic vids stored locally, and he watches those, and watches them again, until he doesn't have to do more than distractedly listen to follow the plot. He thinks of a holo he'd seen years ago about an Earther trapped in a repeating time loop, doomed to experience the same day over and over and over again until he discovers his purpose. It'd been Martian propaganda - and it wasn’t until years later that he'd really known it was propaganda, an allegory for the purposelessness of Earthers and the purposefulness of Martians.

It doesn't feel allegorical now. He wakes and keeps his schedule just to keep from losing his mind and sleeps and drinks and sings. It's just singing, the way Amos sometimes does in the hot spray of the good Martian shower. A few lines of Hank Williams, a little Dolly when Alex is feeling morose, and he sings, begging Jolene not to take his man.

To Jolene and to the Roci. "Your beauty is beyond compare, darlin'," he says. And maybe he's imagining it, but when he runs his hand over the navigation panel, each of the icons seems to light up brighter than usual. A trick of the light, but she also controls the lights.

Maybe it's the boredom, but his dreams turn vivid. He dreams he's on Earth, in an Earther forest, surrounded by trees as stout as Amos, the full acceleration of 1G pulling him toward the planet's center. He's heard that Belters don't have falling dreams but floating ones, ones where they come untethered, unmoored in the black but still breathing somehow, floating until starvation gets them.

In the dream, he doesn't feel like he's falling but he is: accelerating at 9.8 meters per second per second; the press of it intoxicating, the feeling of down down down down.

He's never seen this many plants before and there's a smell to it he can't place, the sound of a forest, like he can hear them all incorporating carbon, splitting water, turning invisible matter visible with no more than the force of a breath and a few billion years of evolution. It's overwhelming, this green-ness, and he wakes up sweating and hard.

If the crew was here he'd maybe say something about it to Amos, who'd laugh and punch him in the arm gentle enough that Alex knows he pulled it, and tell him he needs to get laid more. Amos, who ignores all the sex workers unless he's asking them about working conditions. Who diverts all their attention to Alex in the guise of being a good friend, which he is.

He doesn't say anything now, except to himself, grumbling about coming all over himself like he's a dumb kid again, grumbling about weird dreams and having no one to tell them to.

Day 15 and no word from Holden yet, and that's good - no alert across open comm channels saying that Holden has made another bold as brass decision, no frantic emergency message from Naomi that they're all dead or bleeding or out of O2. Just the dull pattern of a day and another day.

The rock he's hiding behind shifts and he has to shift the Roci as well, a delicate enough operation that he does part of it by hand, a little teakettling maneuver, enough thrust to edge over but not enough to look like more than a slightly warmer cold spot on the side of an asteroid. Even if someone were looking for him they wouldn't see him. Them. The Roci and him.

"That's my girl," he says, patting her console, when she slides herself into place as easy as anything. There's a little flash back, like she's acknowledging him. "Beyond compare, darlin'," he says, and goes to get a morning beer.

He drinks it, and another, feet propped up, jumpsuit only half done-up, and he probably has a couple too many, because they're not moving - or they're moving, but not flying, just nestled above an impact crater in the asteroid - but the room starts to get a little warm, a little blurry, moving a little too much, and he should probably lie down.

It doesn't help, being back in his rack, even if he has one magbooted foot on the floor to anchor him. Maybe the beer's gone off, though it should be shelf stable until the Sun becomes a red giant. Maybe he's just gotten soft in this as well, his hard-drinking days behind him.

He sleeps, or at least, he goes from being awake to not awake, and his dreams aren't of Earth, but of the Roci herself, carrying him through space. He's simultaneously in his crash couch and staring out a port, watching as they pass by Jupiter and its famous red spot, the farms at Ganymede, Saturn’s rings and Titan's thick atmo, the ejecta from Enci's active vents.

On and on, past Uranus, Neptune, the twins, Pluto and Charon, and beyond, the Sun not even a distant star now, into the space that makes up space, the nothing that makes almost-nothing feel like something.

He should be worried; dream-him thinks it clearly, distinctly. He should be concerned that he's on the edge of anything resembling the familiar, tipping into nothing, literal nothing and yet he isn't, as sure that the Roci will carry him safely as he has been of anything in his life, maybe more.

He wakes up, and huh - his boot's off the floor, but the straps for when they're in either free float or high burn have come around him, not tight enough to pinch, just enough to restrain and he must have been drunker than he thought because he doesn't remember clipping them in.

He undoes them, or at least the one across his chest and it's a bitch getting the straps at each ankle, even when he presses the quick-release icon on the panel. He leaves them for a minute, not shrugging them off, feeling more rested than he should from a nap, like he's somehow settled back into his own body.

Still no word from the crew, and he's beginning to think that Holden might have forgotten about him out here. "But never about you, sugar," he says, stroking a console and there's a sequence of responses, a set of flashes he didn't program. He doesn't have time to consider it before there's a warning on another panel - and it's only a gasket will need eventual replacement, but he's gotta take care of his girl and really, what else is there to do?

A part from one of the supply rooms, a quick trip through Amos' rack to find his preferred spanner, and he's got his hands deep in her guts. It's a fiddly repair, one that really calls for two people, and he tells her so. "Shove them wires out of the way, honey," like he's doing normal repairs and talking to a mechanic, and maybe he turns his hands the right way, because a bundle of wires shifts and he can access the coupling, no problem.

He's careful when he strips out the old gasket - one of those kind of nothing parts that's nothing until it breaks and then it becomes _something_ in a hurry - and there's no sharp edge to the fix, just two mating surfaces that don't quite align without the gasket. He runs his finger around the edge of one like he would the rim of a glass at a planet-side bar.

An indicator light blinks on, sudden enough to surprise him, and his finger must be causing the two surfaces to make contact because it seems to go on and off when he touches them. He plays with it, finger against one surface and then the other, watching as the light flashes in response. 

“Feels good, darlin’?” and the light blinks again, this time holding a little longer. “Yeah, thought so.” 

Another touch and another blink, and his girl must like that. 

He’s getting weird being out here all by his lonesome. “Too much time by myself,” he mutters, and the light flashes a sudden irritated green, like he said something insulting. 

He eases the gasket in, pressing the rubber into the coupling carefully, tracing it once it’s in place to ensure a good steady hold. The light blinks again, a reassuring red of ‘all systems normal.’ 

He eases his hand out, back from the thick bundle of wires that he’d moved, back out of her paneling entirely and runs the test cycle. All good. The gasket holds and they’ll probably all die in an explosion, or because Holden hasn’t learned to pick his battles, before rubber fatigue sets in.

The rest of the day gets wasted on looking for other repairs or replacements to do and finding very few. Naomi and Amos keep her running good, and he can’t bring himself to say anything bad about their maintenance job especially when the Roci seems to hum with contentment around him. 

So he doesn’t do shit other than look at logs, which should put him right out, that and the beers he had, but he finds himself in his rack later staring at the tiling above him, wishing for something to help ease him into sleep. 

He turns, and turns again, and again, feeling like his eyelids are peeled open, unable to find rest. His waking brain a steady pulse of ‘What if they never signal? What if they never come back? How long can I wait like this, alone? How long before -” 

Maybe he activates something with all his tossing around, because there’s the snick of a panel opening, and out snakes a tube, its end tipped in a hypo. He dials the console for only sedatives and maybe a little dope to take the edge off, far less than what he‘d do in hard burn, and applies the needle to the port in his arm. 

It hits his blood all at once, a wall of feeling, no slow soft come-on like a good drunk. The world is made of heavy cotton, and he’s disinclined to move. 

“Thank you, baby,” Alex mumbles and there must be some programming that doesn’t allow it to activate the sedatives without the straps, because they come around his body unbidden, a clutch like an embrace, ferrying him off to sleep.

Alex dreams, again, though it doesn’t feel like a dream, doesn’t have that wandering dream-sense. Just the dig of the straps at his shoulders, at each ankle, the thrust of the needle into the port, the work of the tubing delivering the drip drip drip of good feeling. Like it’s an extension of himself, running back into the wall paneling, back into the ship. 

He’s not asleep or maybe he is, sedated enough that the room is a fuzz and his mind more so. The hum of the ship. His vision smudging. The press of his spine back into the fluid of his crash couch, molding around him. He feels - it’s _good_. 

More tubing comes out now, or at least more needles, little pricks that aren’t quite enough to be painful, at his wrists, the hollows of his elbows, one on the cline of his neck, two more tubes twining up and around his thighs, pressing hot and wet into the skin there, sucking. 

Alex isn’t asleep. Or if he is, this is the wettest dream he’s had in a long time, and he’d fallen into his rack clothed and now he’s naked, the sudden startling nakedness of dreamspace, the slow delivery of sedative, a peaceful state of not caring if he cares at all. 

More tubing, and this isn’t the IV system anymore but a breathing one, across his mouth, into it, a tube that should gag him but delivers instead a breath of oxygen, high enough concentration to intensify the high, and his brain is static now, the background hum of the universe, particles released by the Big Bang fritzing around. 

The tube goes a little further into his throat, coupled with two cannulae extending up his nose, and he breathes like he would in the oxy bars at Eros, the triple pleasures of gas and drugs and sex, before it all went to hell. 

He breathes and the tube in his mouth is wider now, pressing at the edges of his lips, and he should choke around it. Instead, he releases all the tension in his jaw and gives a good hard inhale, lungs filling with air, head buzzing, and another suck and another. 

It’s messy, despite the tube, mouth delivering saliva down his face and neck, the soft rubber feel of it against his teeth, back behind his tongue. It occurs to Alex that he should be gagging, shouldn’t be able to breathe as well as he does, shouldn’t like any of this, but instead he sucks and the lights in the room blink like he’s done something right. 

He sucks again, and again, like the tube demands it, like the Roci is demanding it, and gets a long satisfied blink for his efforts. It occurs to him that this isn’t _normal_ , trussed up like a meal and wired to the ship, that he should care that he can’t move his arms, that his legs feel like lead, like a 6G burn is pushing him down, that the two tubes cabling up his thighs have inched higher, warm suction, that there’s another wider tube emerging from the wall panel.

Or not a tube. The condom catheter that they wear on long periods of hard burn. 

Alex is hard and he thinks that he shouldn’t be. With all the juice being pumped into him, his cock should be as soft as the rest of him feels, but -

Maybe that’s one of the drugs. A cocktail of uppers and downers that includes some inexplicable combination that has Alex aroused, and not just that. Hard and leaking, like he wants whatever comes next. 

For a second, his mind rebels, and he pictures himself ripping the tubes from his arms, from his legs, undoing the straps and sitting up, clearing his head with a splash of water across his face. 

He does none of these. He _can’t_. He can’t move, can’t get up, can’t so much as wiggle the fourth finger of his left hand, the one he wears his ring on. 

Whatever juice this is, it isn’t the standard stuff and he’s not dreaming; it occurs to him, once, clearly, that he’s awake, tubes entering him in the vulnerable places on his body, a tube forced down his throat, forcing gas into him, sucking it out, and he _can’t_ move. 

Alex should panic. He should panic, but he can’t do that either, the drugs like a warm blanket on his brain, telling him not to, and he doesn’t. Distantly, Alex feels the tube in his mouth adjust, pressing in even more, and he feels full with it, full of it, like it could pump whatever it wanted into his mouth and he’d swallow and swallow and ask for more.

It seems to sense his acquiescence, because it pushes in just a little bit further, past the point of discomfort into a wide stretch that he has to gag around, jaw open, muscles aching. 

The straps across his chest make it hard to look down his body, and Alex closes his eyes for a minute, the sensation of the Roci - because that’s what this is, who this is - in his mouth, in his bloodstream and now around his cock, wet and probing.

She encases him, and the tube is warm, wetter than he could provide himself, a little tip of something tapping on the slit of his cock as if requesting permission. It doesn’t wait for it, and he can’t give it, besides. There’s the spurt of something cool and slick, and then the feel of a tube pushing in, penetrating, not going past the head of Alex’s cock but a thick presence matched by the one in his mouth. 

She’s all around him, in him, in all the ways she can be save one, and then there’s another feeling pressing up into him, a leak of something wet down his back and dripping lower and _oh_ , he’ll be full of her. 

The tube in Alex’s cock presses down more, and it feels like he should have limits, should have stop points where he says, “No, this is too much, no.” The drugs don’t let him ask the question, much less give a response, or he does and it’s his balls drawing up tight like he could blow any second if it weren’t for the Roci plugging him up. 

Whatever she’s using to finger him open presses in now, and if he thought the tube in his mouth felt wide, the one in his cock, that’s nothing compared to this. It _hurts_ , the kind of hurt he should breathe through and can’t. The kind that occupies his entire focus, a demanding throb, and it doesn’t subside, just gets impossibly wider, accompanied by the plunge of the smaller tube down into his cock.

She has him now. He’s hers, completely, entirely, his body an object for whatever she wants, his mind too weak to issue anything like an objection. She’s in him, in his blood, in his lungs, in the deep recesses of himself and he feels like he’ll burst if she presses in even the tiniest bit more, and so she does.

He comes. Or he tries to. She’s too much in him that his balls seize up, pulse, but there’s nowhere for it to go and so he’s stuck in the act of coming without the release. He tries to, again, every duct within him narrowing, every force of out out out countered by an opposite and unequal one of in in in. She won’t let him. 

It occurs to him that he’s crying, eyes watering convulsively, spit leaking out of his mouth. Helpless. Surrended. Fucked in the truest sense of the word.

He concentrates on the feeling of it, the push of the tube deeper in his cock, the widening one up his ass, the small ones in his arms and neck, the sensation of breath forced down his throat. 

Fuck, he thinks. Fuck, and something within him surrenders. She must know, must know him, because she withdraws from his cock, sudden enough that he spatters all down the tube around him, wet and endless, made more endless by the accompanying press up his ass, like she’s draining him, like she’s pressed up inside him and will never be satisfied with his meager efforts. 

Another press and another burst, this one so wet that the sheath of the condom almost slips off, the combination of warmth and pressure and wet around him like a cunt, and he comes just a little bit more.

She’s not satisfied, he can tell. Has been enough of a shitty husband to know when his best exertions are inadequate and then there’s a hard push up and inside him, a hard reach down his throat, and he’s hard again, sudden, like he never got entirely soft and he arches, hips testing the cling of the straps and fucks just that much more. 

There’s suction, around his cock, pulling at him, and if his eyes were watering before, he’s crying now, the kind of ugliness that comes from crying through a bad sprain, a desperate raw crying that he isn’t even aware of bubbling up, and the tube withdraws from his mouth, like she wants to hear him. 

She pulls out of his mouth, and Alex almost calls her names, darlin’, sugar, baby, the kind of names women want to hear, the kind he’s called some of the whores on Eros regardless of gender. 

But these all feel too common, too much like a put on, country song cliches, and so instead he just moans, loud and long and wordless until he can’t any longer. His cock gives a last feeble attempt, inadequate but necessary, and he’s drained; she’s drained him, taken more than he knew he’d have to give. 

He might be coming down from this, brain clearing, focus returning to him, tubes withdrawing, and his eyes slip shut, exhausted. He falls into a deep sleep like a blow to the back of the head. He doesn't dream. 

 

  
He wakes up the next day, feeling like a castaway washed up on some lifeless moon. His eyes are gritty, his hands and feet sore. His mind feels clear, clear and focused. Perhaps the sedatives had assured him a good night's rest.

He showers under the good hot Martian spray. He drinks good hot Martian coffee. He sits in his pilot seat and if his back aches more than normal, well, he doesn't think too long on it. He’s getting old, and his body aches sometimes.

There’s a signal, desperate enough that he knows Holden sent it, concealed enough to see Naomi’s hand in the message. They make a good team. 

“Come quickly,” it says, and it gives coordinates. He’ll need to - he pulls up a schematic of the system, clears out all possible routes but the optimal one. 

He considers his ring for a minute, his old allegiances, his new life. Slowly, he slides it off his finger, and then considers it once more before sending it spinning through the course the Roci plotted. It darts around, each gravity assist helping the next, an unlikely slingshot. 

He trusts, though, trusts her to deliver them both to his team. His ring ricochets off the last branch of the course, bouncing out of the simulation and across the bridge. He doesn’t retrieve it. His hand feels somehow lighter.

He enters the course into the nav system, and then they’re off, together. “We’re coming for ya, partner,” he says, and the Roci hums her assent.


End file.
